The traditional police procedural is one genre where live-action Jdrama holds it own. Hollywood could do a lot worse than license a series like Partners just for the premise and the plots.

Much of the credit goes to Ranpo Edogawa (1894–1965), a tireless promoter of the mystery novel in Japan. His pen name is a pun on the Japanese pronunciation of Edgar Allan Poe. Edogawa is best remembered for the Kogoro Akechi and Boy Detectives Club young adult mystery novels, published between 1936 and 1962.

His efforts are widely acknowledged today. The mystery genre is prominent not only on prime-time television and the best-seller lists, but has long been a staple of young adult manga and anime.

Kindaichi Case Files, based on characters created by mystery writer Seishi Yokomizo, has been published by Kodansha since 1992. The ongoing Case Closed (titled Detective Conan in Japanese) was launched by Shogakukan in 1994, with the accompanying anime totaling more than 1140 episodes.

The main character in Case Closed sports the nom de plume of Conan Edogawa, an additional tribute to Arthur Conan Doyle as well. There is no shortage of detectives surnamed Akechi in contemporary Japanese crime fiction.

Speaking of Conan Doyle, Great Britain and Japan share similar cultural elements that make them ideal settings for the cozy mystery. Namely, generally accepted rules of propriety and a veneer of "polite society" easily disrupted (but not deeply damaged) by an otherwise "ordinary" crime. The world need not end in every episode.

Like a returning tide, we expect the greater cultural forces at work to wash away the disruptive elements and reset the stage for next week. So we shrug off the comically high murder rates in Midsomer and Cabot Cove, and the body counts in Kindaichi Case Files and Case Closed that can exceed that of the entire country on a weekly basis.

To be sure, a gun is rarely the murder weapon. But watch out for knives, rope, stairs, and every kind of blunt object! Reality forces Japanese crime writers to get creative, and they embrace all the plausible possibilities. It follows that the geeky appeal of the CSI subgenre has made it a favorite with audiences.

The CSI guy on Partners played a supporting role for twenty-one seasons. Kasoken no Onna ("Woman of the Science Research Institute") is in its twenty-fourth season. Like Crime Scene Talks (seven seasons), the plotting is pretty much by the numbers. But the reason we follow a recipe is because it works.

Viki has a handful of localized live-action police procedurals. For now, though, your best bet for subs or dubs is anime.

Crunchyroll has a boatload of Case Closed episodes. Sticking strictly to the puzzle-solving cozy mystery formula, five of my anime favorites are Holmes of Kyoto, Hyouka, In/Spectre, Beautiful Bones, and Onihei.

Hyouka and Holmes of Kyoto are classic whodunits that closely follow the classic formula, even though the cases often don't involve any actual crimes.

I love the clever English language title for In/Spectre, a supernatural detective series. It can get overly talky, especially in the first season, but Kotoko takes us through her reasoning process step by step. Though she is an often unreliable narrator, manipulating events to produce the outcome she prefers.

In Beautiful Bones, Sakurako Kujo is an even more eccentric osteologist than Temperance "Bones" Brennan, the series that inspired the English title. The Japanese title translates as "A Corpse is Buried Beneath Sakurako's Feet."

Onihei is an action-heavy Edo period police procedural that doesn't flinch from depicting the complete lack of due process rights for suspects at the time.

And although she only appears in a couple of episodes in a series that can't be classified in the genre, the hard-boiled vampire-hunting private eye in Call of the Night is such a great noir character that I'd like to see her get a show of her own.

Related posts

Scene of the crime writer

Labels: crunchyroll, dlibjapan, edogawa, hidive, japanese culture, japanese tv, mystery, streaming, tubi, viki

If a show on Jme TV is in a series, the series can be removed from the queue ("My List"). But for movies and series listed as standalone episodes (like Shoten), I couldn't figure out how to remove them from the queue. Clicking the thumbnail simply replayed the show without providing any other options.

But it turns out there is a workaround.

After you've watched a show, the title URL defaults to the following format:

https://www.jme.tv/playback/item/######

If you edit the URL as follows, then the My List checkmark icon will appear:

https://www.jme.tv/details/VIDEO/item/######

The hashmarks represent the five or six-digit code at the end of the URL unique to each program.

One of the best features of the Roku is its simple user interface. To make things even simpler, under Settings > Home Screen > Layout you can remove a lot of the clutter on the Roku home screen.

Useful links

NHK World Premium program guide
NHK World News (in Japanese)
NHK Radio News (in Japanese)
News networks that stream on YouTube (in Japanese)

Labels: dlibjapan, japanese tv, jme, streaming, technology

In its announcement for the Jme TV streaming service, NHK Cosmomedia said that "We are planning to add new features [starting in] April." The Roku app arrived at the beginning of March, though it is little more than a remake of the dLibrary Japan app it replaced.

The big new feature is the addition of NHK World Premium as a replacement for TV Japan.

The rollout actually began on March 19. March 20 was the official start date for transitioning legacy TV Japan customers to the new service, with a 30-day free trial period tossed in for current Jme TV and TV Japan subscribers. So I'll stick around for at least another month.

The only noticeable change to Jme is the addition of the three (grossly oversized) buttons pictured above.

Jme Select
NHK World Premium
NHK World Japan

Jme Select uses the same format as NHK World Japan (a six-hour block repeated four times a day) but with content based on the domestic NHK feed. The NHK World Japan button simply mirrors the live stream that is also available at the NHK World Japan website (for free).

The NHK World Premium content is the live stream used in Europe since NHK shut down its European satellite service (JSTV) at the end of October 2023.

A Schedule link has been added to the Jme website and app, though the program guides at the NHK World Japan and NHK World Premium websites are easier to follow. For the latter, plug in your time zone at the top and you're good to go.

I am baffled why NHK Cosmomedia didn't repurpose the NHK World Premium website since the programming is the same. The NHK World Japan and NHK World Premium sites are better designed and far more functional. The Jme website and app have the same lousy user interface.

I have to hope that once everything is up and running, NHK Cosmomedia will rebuild the TV Japan website as the new home page. Though at the current prices, I won't be sticking around to use it in any case.

NHK Cosmomedia grandfathered in a two-tiered subscription plan for dLibrary Japan subscribers, with the VOD tier at $15/month. I might have been tempted at the original $9.99/month rate. That temptation evaporates at $15/month. At $25/month, I don't have to give it a second thought.

So I'm gone after the trial period ends. But I'll still give it a month and a half to see how the whole thing works. The video quality so far is certainly satisfactory.

Related posts

Jme TV
NHK World Japan program schedule
NHK World Premium program schedule

Whither TV Japan
The end of TV Japan
Jme TV (grumpy old man edition)

Labels: business, dlibjapan, japanese, japanese culture, japanese tv, jme, streaming, technology, television, tv japan

The Jme TV website has been live for a month. It remains a work in progress. The layout is bare bones. Site navigation barely exists. A Roku player is "coming soon." But rest assured that "We are planning to add new features from April," which suggests the current website may simply be a placeholder.

To give credit where it is due, you can now bookmark shows in your browser and you don't get logged out every time you close the browser tab.

Still, it wouldn't hurt to fix the UI problems, such as a useless banner that takes up half of the home page. The oversized genre icons that belong in a menu. Get rid of horizontal scrolling. NHK World Japan has a list-based program guide. Viki has a grid-based program guide. Both are so much better. Pick one.

I really cannot overemphasize how badly designed the Jme TV website is and how difficult it would be to scale in its current configuration. Again, I have to hope it is only a placeholder and something better will emerge in April.

In Japan, everything starts in April, from the school year to the corporate fiscal year. Except for the NHK Taiga drama. It starts in January. Speaking of which, new episodes of the Taiga drama are being added every week. Along with other recent TV Japan content, the catalog no longer feels so threadbare.

Although it's akin to filling a swimming pool with a squirt gun.

My theory for the premature rollout is that NHK Cosmomedia went ahead and pulled the plug on its TV Japan cable contracts and has to fill that hole by April 2024 with something. They should have followed the herd and called the new site TV Japan Plus or NHK World Plus and reused what they had on hand.

As a previous dLibrary Japan subscriber, I signed up for $9.99/month. That $9.99/month price lasts three months and then skyrockets to $25/month, which makes this a three-month experiment. Nothing NHK Cosmomedia has put on the table so far is worth $9.99/month, let alone 2.5 times that.

Once upon a time, TV Japan had a monopoly on live-action Japanese content and could charge whatever the market could bear. That didn't mean we liked it. As one Reddit commenter puts it, "$25/month for mostly NHK through an already overpriced cable package was one of the larger ripoffs in my life."

Taken together, there is plenty of Japanese content on Viki ($5.99/month), Netflix ($6.99/month), and Crunchyroll ($7.99/month) I could be watching instead. All three don't add up to $25/month and I don't subscribe to all three at the same time. And that's not counting NHK World Japan (free) and Tubi (free).

The only criteria Tubi appears to follow when licensing Japanese content is that it's cheap and available. It's an approach that delivers a lot of dreck, but at the same time, often yields pleasant surprises, like the Edo period Detective Dobu television series from 1991. I just wish Tubi would make it easier to find.

If NHK Cosmomedia had any sense, it'd make the site free until it becomes fully functional and then copy Rakuten Viki's pricing plan, starting at $5.99/month.

It could offer a premium tier to those who want to watch live broadcasts and real-time news (though NHK's domestic news programs are free on the NHK World Premium website).

Anyway, we'll find out in April if there is any there there. I have to admit, morbid curiosity is my main motivation now. Like, you can't sign up for TV Japan using the information on the TV Japan website. It points you to providers who have removed TV Japan from their lineups. But that page hasn't been taken down.

This is the same page that states, "The price of TV Japan is about $15/month." That has never been true and yet it's been posted there for a year. One cynical explanation is that it doesn't matter because it's all going away in April. Another is that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

Oh, and to answer a previous question, the name "is derived from the hope that Jme can help bridge Japan (J) and (me)." At least the URL is easier to remember.

Related posts

Whither TV Japan
dLibrary Japan (big upgrade in the works)

Labels: business, dlibjapan, japanese tv, jme, nhk, nhk cosmomedia, nhk world, streaming, television, tv japan

NHK Cosmomedia once had a near monopsony and monopoly when it came to the cable and satellite TV markets in North America. Nippon TV briefly forayed into the business on DirecTV while cable providers only offered TV Japan.

As a result, NHK Cosmomedia became the primary buyer and distributor of live-action content from Fuji TV, Nippon TV, TBS, TV Asahi, TV Tokyo, and Wowow, with NHK World Japan relying largely on JIB TV.

Unlike anime, few other platforms have demonstrated a great desire to compete in this space. Even Rakuten Viki and Netflix focus most of their programming efforts in Asian on Kdrama. Japanese content is more of a side gig.

Which is why TV Japan has been able to levy a $25/month premium for the past three decades. By contrast, Kokowa, the Korean equivalent of TV Japan, charges $6.99/month for its streaming service (also available on Xfinity X1).

Nevertheless, I grudgingly paid the price when TV Japan was on DISH and the grand total came to $42/month. When TV Japan left DISH and went to DirecTV and Xfinity, the overhead almost doubled the total into no way territory.

By then, more affordable options had become available. Crunchyroll offers a vast library of anime for $7.99/month. You can stream NHK's domestic newscasts and Japan's commercial news services post their live feeds to YouTube. NHK World Japan is free.

In the meantime, streaming has been eating away at traditional cable TV like a hungry great white shark. As Luke Bouma sums up the bad news,

In just the first half of 2023, cable TV companies lost over 2,748,000 TV subscribers. All together, cable TV companies are losing about 15,000 subscribers every single day in 2023. If this trend continues, cable TV companies will lose over 4 million subscribers in 2023.

As things turned out, in 2023, Comcast alone lost over 2,036,000 TV subscribers and another 38,676 Internet customers to 5G home Internet and fiber.
As bad as things are for Comcast, the decline of traditional cable TV presents an existential threat to niche entertainment products like TV Japan.

This demographic reality first struck home in Europe, where NHK's home satellite service (JSTV) shut down on October 31, 2023, citing a decline in subscribers. In its domestic market, NHK merged BS1 and BS Premium into NHK BS on December 1, 2023.

Things that can't go on forever won't. The question is how long forever is. In this case, it may have already happened. A commenter points out that TV Japan is no longer in the international channel lineups on the Xfinity and DirecTV websites.

Indeed, while the TV Japan website still lists Xfinity as a provider, if you navigate to the international channels on DISH, Xfinity, Optimum, and DirecTV, the Japanese option is gone. TV Japan is also not available on any of the live TV streaming services.

Spectrum will formally bid TV Japan goodbye at the end of March.

TV Japan and TV Japan HD on channels 1500 and 2587 will cease programming and will no longer be available on the Spectrum TV lineup after March 31.

The obvious conclusion is that, after over three decades on satellite and cable, NHK Cosmomedia is abandoning traditional linear TV as the content delivery vehicle for TV Japan in North America, with a target date of April 1, 2024.

If so, NHK World Japan likely has a lot to do with the decision. NHK Cosmomedia launched NHK World Japan in 1998 and has since transformed it into a free livestreaming, video-on-demand, and (in some areas) over-the-air service.

So it has been there and done that and should know the ropes. Although since TV Japan only broadcasts the news and some sporting events live, it may not need to livestream at all.

In any case, this would explain why Jme TV is charging $25/month for new sign-ups. Because that's been the cost of a TV Japan subscription since time immemorial. Then why not host TV Japan on the TV Japan website? We should find out in April.

But let me wildly speculate. The first Jme TV signup email that NHK Cosmomedia sent out by accident suggested a tiered subscription model. What we could be getting in April is a livestream link to TV Japan.
The way the old dLibrary Japan website had a link in the masthead to NHK World Japan. I'm thinking something like that.

Related links

NHK World (Japanese)
NHK World (English)
TV Japan
News from Japan
Jme TV
Japan's phantom content boom

Labels: business, dlibjapan, japanese tv, jme, streaming, technology, tv japan

So this email arrived in my inbox encouraging me to sign up for a new Jdrama VOD service called JME.

Having never heard of it before, my first reaction was to wonder how it got my email address. The obvious sources were TV Japan or dLibrary Japan. I did a trademark search and, yes, NHK Cosmomedia registered the JME logo. But despite touting Roku support in the email, there wasn't a JME app on the Roku website.

And the dLibrary Japan website placeholder hadn't changed. Was this the relaunch of dLibrary Japan? That question was answered by a totally not unexpected second email from NHK Cosmomedia three hours later that basically said, "Um, you know that email you just got? Please ignore it and don't click on any of the links."

In a few days, we will notify you via email about the launch of the new video streaming service "Jme," replacing dLibrary Japan. Please stay tuned for this email, as it will contain a special promotion code for exclusive viewing at a discounted rate.

And then three hours after that, dLibrary Japan sent the same email. Apology accepted!

Good to know that JME is a legit NHK Cosmomedia website and it is intended as the replacement for dLibrary Japan. In fact, NHK Cosmomedia registered the JME logo in June 2023 and announced the suspension of dLibrary Japan in September. It's sort of reassuring that the project has been on the back burner for that long.

I still have questions. To start with, what does JME even stand for?

Labels: dlibjapan, japanese tv, jme, nhk cosmomedia, nhk world, streaming, tv japan

NHK Cosmomedia has done a good job establishing NHK World Japan as its free overseas streaming and VOD service. It uses the TV Japan brand for its cable and satellite channel in North American and NHK World Premium outside North America.

Were I the marketing consultant for NHK Cosmomedia, I'd go with TV Japan as the brand for all linear TV programming. NHK World Japan would continue as the free service and the subscription streaming services would inherit the NHK World Premium brand.

Or it could follow the herd and call it Plus. And, in fact, NHK's domestic streaming service (geoblocked outside of Japan) is called NHKプラス (NHK+).

Along with the recent removal of geo-blocking from NHK's flagship news programs (branded as NHK World Premium content), the noticeably improved video quality also hints at a possible integration between NHK World Japan and NHK World Premium.

NHK World Japan had always compressed the heck out of its video feeds. So while relatively still images delivered the full HD quality, any motion (such as during a sumo tournament) resulted in on-screen pixelation and artifacting.

But watching the November 2023 sumo tournament, I couldn't help noticing how much the video quality had improved. We're talking leaps and bounds. Almost no image distortion at all. Crystal clear HD even with full motion.

Raising the bar like this may be a first step to a tiered unification of NHK's online services. Another clue is that two of NHK's domestic satellite channels, BS1 and BS Premium, merged into NHK BS on December 1, 2023.

Going forward, content consolidation will become the name of the game as NHK faces an aging and literally shrinking audience, with the population of Japan predicted to drop another 10 million by the end of the decade.

Once upon a time, I subscribed to TV Japan. Were money no object, I still would, but it is only available on cable and DirecTV and is insanely expensive to boot.

The actual TV Japan subscription by itself still costs the same $25/month it has for decades. That price is dear enough, and doesn't include the ever growing mountain of taxes and fees Xfinity piles on top of even its "Limited Basic" tier.

South Korea's closest counterpart to TV Japan is the streaming service Kocowa, a joint venture between the top three Korean broadcast networks. A basic (ad-free) subscription to Kocowa runs $70/year.

That's about how much TV Japan costs a month on Xfinity. Cost alone is a big reason why live Japanese content has little chance of achieving the same market success outside Japan as anime or Kdrama.

Labels: dish, dlibjapan, japanese tv, jdrama, kdrama, nhk, nhk cosmomedia, nhk world, streaming, tv japan

With dLibrary Japan offline until April 2024 (at the latest), it's once again time to reshuffle my Japanese language streaming choices. Tubi and NHK World Japan are free, so no decisions to make there.

Viki goes into watch and drop rotation. No complaints about the service itself. To start with, it's eminently affordable. It's a content mismatch. The Japanese content focuses on BL and romance. Frankly, when it comes to romance, Jdrama simply doesn't measure up to manga and anime.

I prefer police procedurals, low-stakes slice of life dramas, and documentaries, which Japanese television writers are much better at pulling off.

Viki has a few in that category, just not that many. But speaking of which, I see that Viki has licensed 99.9 Criminal Lawyer. It's a well done execution of the reliable formula that pits an eccentric defense lawyer against his uptight boss (a corporate lawyer because it pays much better).

And while I'm at it, I'll again point out that Viki has Sleeper Hit, a fun, insightful, and even philosophical examination of the manga publishing world and the hard-nosed business of selling art.

In any case, as with pretty much every streaming service that doesn't focus specifically on Japan, Viki's Jdrama offerings take a back seat to its Kdrama series (true of Tubi and Netflix too). But if that is what you're looking for, Viki is one of the better overall sources for Asian content.

Unfortunately, take away dLibrary Japan and Viki and there aren't that many viable Jdrama alternatives left. When TV Japan was alive on traditional cable, it added up to eighty (!) bucks a month for a single channel on Xfinity. Not an option when I cap my monthly streaming budget at twenty dollars.

Tubi has a few Jdrama series and (subbed) Japanese movies worth watching. It sure doesn't make them easy to find. But a little effort will occasionally turn up genuine classics, campy tokusatsu series (featuring primitive CG effects and guys in rubber suits), and recent releases like Blue Thermal.

At least for now, that leaves Netflix as far and away the best of the remaining Hobson's choices.

Anime, by comparison, offers an embarrassment of riches. Thanks to Sony's acquisition of Funimation and Crunchyroll, Crunchyroll rules the anime streaming world. You could watch Crunchyroll all day long and not make a dent in the huge backlist before getting swamped by dozens of new titles.

The annual subscription option makes Crunchyroll an even better deal. On price alone, HIDIVE is the most affordable anime streaming service but is so much smaller that it's hard to justify an annual subscription anymore.

I've been following Princess Principal and Girls und Panzer on HIDIVE. Both franchises have moved to the theatrical model. This wouldn't be a problem if they were releasing standalone movies but they're actually serials. What we end up with are regular series produced at a glacial pace.

I'll wait until a season is over before watching it. I'm very much on board with the old Netflix approach of releasing a whole series at once. Even on Crunchyroll, I watch a season behind the current schedule. The added benefit is that makes it easier to figure out which series are worth the time.

While waiting for titles to accumulate, HIDIVE joins Viki in the watch and drop category. Once I run out of live-action content on Tubi, I'll shift to Viki and then to Netflix. Netflix uniquely provides Japanese subtitles for much of its Japanese content, a very valuable language learning resource.

Related links

NHK World (Japanese)
NHK World (English)
Crunchyroll
HIDIVE
Netflix
Rakuten Viki
Tubi

Labels: anime, business, crunchyroll, dlibjapan, hidive, japanese culture, japanese tv, jdrama, kdrama, manga, netflix, nhk, nhk world, sony, streaming, technology, tubi, tv japan

In my original post about Japan's television news YouTube feeds, I stated that the only way to see Good Morning Japan, NHK's flagship morning news program, was on TV Japan.

That is no longer the case. You can watch Good Morning Japan, News at Noon, and News 7 on the NHK World Premium website. Also available are Today's Close-Up and A Small Journey.

dLibrary Japan has announced plans to include NHK news when it relaunches its subscription streaming service. Removing the geo-blocking may be a first step to including these programs in the new lineup.

Along with the commercial news network feeds on YouTube, you can listen to NHK Radio News online.

Related links

NHK World (Japanese)
NHK World (English)
News from Japan
Weather News

Labels: dlibjapan, good morning japan, japanese, japanese tv, nhk, nhk world, streaming, tv japan

Japan's commercial news networks and a number of regional television stations stream their news feeds on YouTube. These news networks are akin to the old school news agencies like Reuters. Stations often subscribe to more than one, including their competitors.

Because the primary purpose of these news networks is to provide their affiliates with broadcast content, the same blocks of material are reused and repeated throughout the day and week. But a broad slate of channels makes it easy to sample a fresh set of stories.

For a couple of fun peeks behind the scenes, Stay Tuned! (Netflix) is a slice-of-life comedy about a television station in Hokkaido. Wave, Listen to Me! (Crunchyroll) is an even wackier comedy about a late-night talk show host at a small radio station in Sapporo.

This is not a definitive list. Watch one channel and the YouTube bots will suggest a bunch more. The World Clock is a good resource for keeping track of the time.
News Networks
• All Nippon News Network (ANN) has 26 affiliates and originates from TV Asahi in Tokyo.

• Fuji News Network (FNN) has 28 affiliates and originates from Fuji Television in Tokyo. FNN has a live cam of the famous Shibuya Crossing.

• Nippon News Network (NNN) has 30 affiliates and originates from Nippon Television (NTV) in Tokyo.

• TBS News Dig is part of the Japan News Network (JNN) with 28 affiliates and originates from TBS Television in Tokyo.
Regional Stations
• HTB Hokkaido News originates from Hokkaido Television Broadcasting in Sapporo. HTB produced Stay Tuned! as part of its fiftieth anniversary.

• STV News originates from Sapporo Television Broadcasting in Sapporo. STV has been the highest rated television station in Hokkaido for over a decade.

• Nagoya TV News originates from the Nagoya Broadcasting Network in Nagoya and focuses on news from Aichi, Gifu and Mie prefectures.

• MBS News originates from the Mainichi Broadcasting System (MBS) in Osaka.

• Kansai News 24 is an ANN affiliate that focuses on news from Osaka, Kyoto, Hyogo, Wakayama, Nara, Shiga, and Tokushima prefectures, known in Japan as the Kansai region.

• Sun TV News originates from Sun Television in Hyogo prefecture.

• Home Hiroshima News originates from Hiroshima Home Television in Hiroshima prefecture.

• Kagoshima News KTS originates from Kagoshima Television Broadcasting Corporation in Kagoshima prefecture, located in the southern part of Kyushu.
Of course, no news can be considered complete without the Weather News.

Labels: business, dlibjapan, geography, japanese culture, japanese tv, nhk, streaming, television, weather

A couple of months ago, I earned an Amazon gift card for participating in a lengthy survey from NHK Cosmomedia about the kind of content I would expect from a streaming service that resembled TV Japan. And how much I'd be willing to pay.

By next April, we should find out the results from that survey.

Changes are afoot at NHK Cosmomedia, which owns and operates (along with Japan International Broadcasting) dLibrary Japan, NHK World, and TV Japan (also known as NHK World Premium).

I've speculated about the possibilities before. Cable cutting is surely eating into TV Japan's subscriber base. The (free) NHK World streaming service already carries a considerable amount of localized NHK edutainment material, including the all-important sumo tournaments.

dLibrary Japan recently started streaming series after their first run on TV Japan and shows after they debuted in Japan. With sumo bouts covered by NHK World, the only programming on TV Japan I really miss are the Taiga and Asadora dramas, and live news from Japan (in Japanese).

NHK World streams news on the hour from its own bureaus, half of the day from New York, and all in English. But, frankly, a lot of the time, I get the feeling that the NHK World anchors think they're on CNN. News from North America often gets more airtime than anything to do with Japan.

dLibrary Japan could become the VOD library for TV Japan, including real-time news and commentary.

It's never had a backlist and only held onto content for a year or two. While services like Retrocrush specialize in classic anime, long-running series like Abarenbo Shogun remain unknown outside Japan. (You can watch Shadow Warriors and a couple of tokusatsu series on Tubi.)

NHK World is available via streaming, OTA, and VOD, so NHK Cosmomedia doesn't need to reinvent the wheel. Ideally, they'd integrate the services in a single app with paid and unpaid tiers. But easier said than done, which is why dLibrary Japan is going on hiatus for several months.

Though I suspect that NHK Cosmomedia's more immediate goal is to rebuild dLibrary Japan with the capacity for future expansion, which will take place at a later date. A Roku app that actually works would be a big step forward.

In any case, for now, dLibrary Japan stopped enrolling new customers on 9/1/2023 and won't post new content after 9/30/2023. The service will go offline on 10/31/2023.

Don't panic! The official press release (which has been updated several times since the original announcement) promises they will be back!

We are thrilled to announce the upcoming introduction of an upgraded streaming distribution service. This renewed service will bring you an even richer selection of Japanese content and improved performance, including the addition of NHK news viewing. To make way for these enhancements, the current dLibrary Japan service will be suspended.

Well, I do like that bit about the news. All we know at this juncture is that the new service will launch "within fiscal year 2023." In Japan, that means before the end of March 2024. They won't need five months to update the apps and servers, so other stuff must be going on behind the scenes too.

I am very curious find out what sort of "upgraded streaming distribution service" NHK Cosmomedia has in store.

Labels: business, dlibjapan, japan, japanese tv, nhk, nhk cosmomedia, nhk world, streaming, technology, television, tv japan

So I resubscribed to dLibrary Japan. dLibrary Japan primarily targets Japanese speakers (and learners) with something-for-everybody prime-time material.

dLibrary Japan is owned and operated by NHK Cosmomedia, which also runs NHK World (available OTA and streaming) and TV Japan (cable and DirecTV).

Because NHK Cosmomedia doesn't want dLibrary Japan competing directly with the pricier TV Japan, its premium Japanese-language cable channel, dLibrary Japan doesn't maintain a permanent backlist or carry live programming.

As a result, the catalog is a mile wide and an inch deep, with licensing periods limited to one year on average (longer for a few extended series). This no doubt saves a lot of money, but it also means you have to watch it or lose it.

On the plus side, dLibrary Japan rotates new content through the service at a brisk clip, so it's not hard to find something good on. You really have to pay attention to the "Coming Soon" category! One benefit of the low demand for live-action J-drama in North America is that dLibrary Japan's only (legal) competition is TV Japan (itself) and Viki.

Not all of the content on dLibrary Japan is exclusive to the site, such as Don't Call it Mystery also on Viki, MIU404 also on Netflix, and Summer Days with Coo also on Tubi. Just most of it.

Even there, Viki skews toward BL and shoujo manga adaptations. Tubi and Netflix (in North America) acquire Japanese language content at a decidedly plodding pace. Both have much larger K-drama catalogs. Netflix and Tubi don't even have a designated J-drama channel. Anime, yes, but they don't have enough J-drama material to bother.

I'd like to see dLibrary Japan become the VOD service for TV Japan. But as mentioned above, what with all the cable cutting going on, NHK Cosmomedia has to worry about cannibalizing its TV Japan subscriber base. Despite its lock on the overseas hospitality industry, subscriber numbers have got to be hurting.

Right now, only Partners (season 21), Crime Scene Talks (season 7), and episodes from the business and economics interview series Ryu's Talking Live and Dawn of GAIA are on both (after the initial run on TV Japan).

The latest Taiga drama is Ryomaden from 2010. There are no Asadora in the catalog. Again, internal competition from TV Japan and NHK World are likely the deciding factors.

On the other hand, dLibrary Japan is streaming a growing number of shows like Logically Impossible in close to real time. Perhaps the service will ultimately end up with all the programming that isn't licensed to TV Japan. That'd work for me!

Right now, live domestic news programs (such as Good Morning Japan) and NHK's flagship Taiga and Asadora dramas are the only bottom-line advantages that TV Japan provides.

Already, several of NHK's travel and infotainment shows run for free on NHK World (often dubbed). dLibrary Japan simply links directly to NHK World. I can imagine all three getting fused into a tiered streaming service in the near future.

Aside from a handful of movies and series, dLibrary Japan has little localized content, which cubbyholes it and TV Japan as niche services and puts a hard cap on the size of their overseas audiences.

Unlike NHK World, which perhaps tries too hard to make its content as accessible as possible. Accessibility sounds like a good thing, but at some point, all of this smoothing out starts to erase what makes a product of Japanese culture uniquely Japanese. Right now, perhaps the anime streaming services do the best job splitting the difference.

You should still subscribe to dLibrary Japan for a month (or two or three) to watch the subtitled Ryomaden, NHK's year-long (48 episodes) biopic about Ryoma Sakamoto, one of the Founding Fathers of modern Japan.

The other draws for me this time around are the latest seasons of Solitary Gourmet and Partners and an eclectic collection of police procedurals (a genre that Japanese scripted dramas excel at), including a return to crime fighting in Kyoto in CSI: Crime Scene Talks.

The 2011 live-action Bunny Drop movie does a good job adapting the first half of the anime and leaves things at that (alas, this movie is not subtitled).

The Roku app is functional. The video plays when you hit play. Otherwise, it's like a half-broken VCR, where the buttons don't reliably do what they're supposed to. Closed captions don't work. They do in the browser app, which doesn't appear to suffer from these issues.

Labels: dlibjapan, good morning japan, japanese, japanese tv, nhk cosmomedia, nhk world, streaming, television, tv japan

Netflix raised its rates. So I dropped Netflix. Though probably not permanently.

My price hike kicked in this month, which gave me time to finish Mitsuo Iso's brilliant Den-noh Coil and Orbital Children (what The Matrix and even Person of Interest coulda shoulda been), and finish season one of Eden's Zero.

The irony is that once a streaming service reaches a certain size, it encounters the same underlying problem with cable television that streaming was supposed to solve, namely the impetus to become a one-stop shop for everybody who walks through the door.

In order to get your specific something, you end up paying for everybody else's something too. On Netflix, that's 200 million somethings.

That gets expensive, though still not as expensive as cable. If you're looking for the broadest possible appeal, if all you want to do is sit down in front of the TV and watch something, anything, then Netflix is a great deal. It's cable without news and sports.

But if you know what you want to watch, then narrowing the options makes more sense. What streaming services need is a way of evaluating the signal-to-noise ratio. Unfortunately, what is a "signal" and what is "noise" is largely subjective.

In terms of the total number of titles I want to watch (the "signal"), Crunchyroll is the runaway winner, at half the cost of Netflix. But in terms of the pure signal-to-noise ratio, tiny HIDIVE comes out on top. And I'm only paying two bucks a month for HIDIVE.

As far as that goes, I'm not paying anything for Tubi. And speaking of Tubi, one option is to pair a premium service with an ad-supported tier.

Perhaps all premium streaming services will eventually pair up with an ad-supported tier to monetize the kind of long-tail material that once ended up on OTA subchannels like ION and MeTV. It looks like Disney Plus may be headed in that direction.

The caveat here is that the service has to invest in ad-server technology that brings the user experience in line with OTA television. Tubi's ad engine mostly accomplishes this. Crunchyroll's ads seemed designed to annoy you into getting a subscription.

So I wasn't surprised when Crunchyroll announced it was ending its ad-supported tier for debuting series starting with the Spring 2022 season.

But the one aspect of streaming that really beats the old cable model is the ability to create a virtual à la carte service using the serial subscriber approach.

On Netflix, I'm looking forward to the second seasons of SAC 2045 (coming in May), Ultraman, Komi Can't Communicate, Eden's Zero, and Godzilla Singular Point (if it ever gets the promised sequel), along with a couple of anime movies.

But in the meantime, it's simply not worth staying subscribed while I wait for them to show up someday.

So Netflix goes back on the carousel. Once enough content accumulates, I'll give the carousel a spin and sign up for a bout of bingeing. Netflix accommodates this approach and will keep a dormant account intact for up to ten months (as does dLibrary Japan).

I'm keeping HIDIVE. The merger of the Crunchyroll and Funimation catalogs makes Crunchyroll a fantastic deal, so I'll swap dLibrary Japan for Crunchyroll. Toss in Tubi and I still have more Japanese content than I have time to watch at a third the cost.

Related posts

Tubi update
The Fun is over
dLibrary Japan update

Labels: anime, business, crunchyroll, dlibjapan, hidive, japanese tv, netflix, streaming

The one basic weakness of dLibrary Japan (the lack of subtitles aside) is that it doesn't have a backlist catalog, a decision that comes down to simple dollars and cents. Licensing shows for a year saves a ton of money they can spend on acquiring more titles, including the occasional simulcast.

Alas, that means I never got around to watching the Tsuribaka Nisshi ("Diary of a Fishing Nut") movies and now they're gone. And because the first six cours of Solitary Gourmet expire at the end of 2021, I ended up binging them (worth it, though). Season nine just arrived (no idea about seasons seven and eight).

Solitary Gourmet, a solid entry in the ever popular food genre, has Yutaka Matsushige traveling around Japan as the self-employed proprietor of an import-export business. Every episode consists almost entirely of Matsushige eating dinner at an actual hole-in-the-wall restaurant with voice-over commentary, a strangely compelling combination.

But that's why much of the programming mentioned in previous updates is no longer available. Here is some of what is, though limited to what I've seen recently or plan to watch. There are only so many hours in the day. Even without a backlist, dLibrary Japan carries a great deal of content (and I've got lots of shows queued up on Netflix and Tubi too).

dLibrary Japan currently has seasons one, eight, eleven, fourteen (through 3/2022), and eighteen (through 8/2022) of the police procedural Partners. It'd be nice to have the entire series available. But with twenty seasons to date, only indefinite license terms would make sense. Hey, how about it, Netflix?

dLibrary Japan is only as good as its latest acquisitions, and they're doing well in the police procedural department, starting with a second cour of 99.9, about a team of eccentric defense lawyers. And a simulcast of the live action version of Police in a Pod, which will debut next year as an anime series.

Police in a Pod is a "realistic" look at daily life in a koban or police box. Meaning that what the lead characters do most of the time is closer to social work than crime fighting. So nothing like the hilarious antics in You're Under Arrest.

Though if you've seen the latter, you'll recognize many of the stock characters in the former. Like every motorcycle cop is some version of those guys from CHiPs.

Detective Yuri Rintaro is a half-cour series in the Holmes & Watson format about a forensic psychologist who consults on cases for the police in Kyoto. There seems to be a Japanese television industry quota for police procedurals based in Kyoto, which is nice for the change of scenery and accents.

Koji Kikkawa in the lead role brings to mind Jeremy Brett as an unexcitable Holmes who dresses way up for his day job and carries it off with aplomb.

Ataru is an autistic version of Monk, so we're pretty much talking complete basketcase. This particular sub-genre only works if the writers are smart enough to convince you that the protagonist is a genius. So far, they've gotten it mostly right, and Masahiro Nakai is convincing in the title role.

I do my best to ignore the Spy vs. Spy subplot, which only makes me suspect that if depictions of American spies in a Japanese show are this silly, then depictions of foreign spies in Hollywood shows are probably just as dumb (like how many of them actually speak that foreign language fluently?).

Signal employs the same plot device as Frequency (with Dennis Quaid and Jim Caviezel). Two detectives fifteen years apart communicate via a pair of time traveling walkie-talkies to solve a cold case.

The second cour of Hanasaki Mai Speaks Out continues the adventures of two bank examiners with a knack for uncovering financial improprieties and bringing down the high and mighty. Yes, accounting can make for some quite entertaining cozy mysteries.

I follow a few dramas and reality shows too.

I saw Dragon Zakura and The Rookies when they debuted on TV Japan. The Rookies wants to be baseball version of Dragon Zakura, though it's closer to Gokusen. But while Gokusen never takes itself seriously, The Rookies takes itself too seriously to take seriously.

My Housekeeper Mr. Nagisa features Mikako Tabe as a super competent rep for a pharmaceutical company. Her private life is a wreck, until her kid sister arranges for Shigino Nagisa to show as a Marty Poppins to put her home life in order.

A couple of episodes in, as with Lucy Liu in Elementary, I started noticing that Mikako Tabe's character apparently has a wardrobe filled with an infinite number of outfits. And as with Liu, Tabe's costume designer does an excellent job dressing her up without it ever looking unnatural.

Masao Kusakari (The Mark of Beauty) teams up with an ugly (animatronic) cat in A Man and His Cat, about a widower getting over the death of his wife.

How About a Coffee? belongs to the same food genre as Midnight Diner, according to which the right food served in the right way at the right time can solve any problem.

Sleepeeer Hit! [sic] (the Japanese title translates as "Print a Second Edition!") explores the business of manga publishing from the point of view of the publisher. The great cast includes Yutaka Matsushige (Solitary Gourmet), Joe Odagiri (Midnight Diner), and stars Haru Kuroki (Hanako and Anne).

Infotainment shows like Before and After (a sped up version of This Old House) are actually the easiest for me to follow. Add to the list another cour of Tetsuro Degawa's delightful travel show, in which he rides a little electric scooter until the battery dies, then runs around trying to bum a charge.

An odder entry in the reality show category is Can I Follow You Home? in which a camera crew hangs around stations in Tokyo to get the story from people who missed the last train home. Higher up the intellectual scale are documentary-style interview shows hosted by Ryu Murakami, Eiko Koike, and Nao Matsushita.

As previously noted, for the most part, only the movies on dLibrary Japan are subtitled. Hanasaki Mai Speaks Out and Signal are two exceptions in this list (Signal even has real subtitles and not closed captions). For now, dLibrary Japan is available in the United States and Canada.

Related posts

dLibrary Japan
dLibrary Japan (update)
dLibrary Japan (background)

Labels: dlibjapan, japanese, japanese tv, netflix, streaming, technology, television, tv japan

NHK Cosmomedia operates NHK World, NHK World Premium (TV Japan in North America), and dLibrary Japan.

NHK World has free streaming apps and is available over-the-air in some markets (UEN-TV in Utah). dLibrary Japan is a subscription streaming service. TV Japan is live television available only as a premium from DirecTV and most cable providers.

I didn't follow TV Japan to DirecTV when NHK Cosmomedia dumped Dish and the price of an à la carte subscription almost doubled (Xfinity is no better). Especially when I found I could subscribe to the big three anime streaming services and Netflix and dLibrary Japan for less.

In the meantime, dLibrary Japan improved its app and catalog, so much so that I've dropped the big three and still get more anime than I have time to watch from Netflix and Tubi. Funimation acquired Crunchyroll from AT&T and AT&T spun off DirecTV to private equity firm TPG while remaining the majority owner.

In one of those comically understated corporate press releases, AT&T admitted that "It's fair to say that some aspects of the [DirecTV acquisition] have not played out as we had planned, such as pay TV households in the US declining at a faster pace across the industry than anticipated back in 2014."

"Not playing out as we planned" means "we took a $15.5 billion impairment on the business in 4Q20."

A boutique content provider like NHK Cosmomedia illustrates the problem in miniature, as it tries to embrace new technologies while not drawing customers away from its premium live television business that launched in 1991. The hospitality industry is one of NHK's biggest international customers and satellite is often the only way to serve them.

But North America is a big market too, and that delivery model is dying on the vine. Elon Musk may soon deliver the coup de grâce with his low-orbit satellite Internet service.

To give NHK credit where it's due, it's been doing a good job hedging its bets, steadily building out its streaming catalogs and providing decent apps. The rudimentary dLibrary Japan Roku app does what it has to do well enough. It does inexplicably lock up once in a blue moon (losing horizontal sync like an old tube TV), but is fine after a reboot.

NHK Cosmomedia has also added content like the monthly Kiyo in Kyoto from powerhouse anime studio J.C. Staff to the (free) NHK World lineup.

The one curious disappointment with dLibrary Japan has been NHK's flagship Asadora and Taiga dramas. dLibrary Japan had a respectable lineup when the service launched, and I expected that they'd continue to get series a year or so after running on NHK and TV Japan. But that hasn't happened.

By the end of August, they'll all be gone from the service.

On the bright side, Aibou ("Partners") is finally on dLibrary Japan. It's one the best police procedurals in the genre, now in its eighteenth season. Yutaka Mizutani plays Detective Ukyo Sugishita as a mix of the persistent inquisitiveness of Peter Falk's Columbo and the fastidiousness of Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes.

The only caveat is that they're starting with seasons one, eight, eleven, fourteen, and eighteen. I guess the idea is to give us a one-season sampler of each of Detective Sugishita's partners.

Yasufumi Terawaki as Kaoru Kameyama, Sugishita's Watson, left the show after seven seasons. Mitsuhiro Oikawa and Hiroki Narimiya stepped in for three seasons each before Takashi Sorimachi took over the role in 2015 and I think created a character that truly filled Kaoru Kameyama's shoes. I've got to hope they'll get around to filling in the gaps.

The scripts were solid from the start, so it's fun to see a young Yasufumi Terawaki in a rough-around-the-edges season one in all its 4:3 SD glory. Most of the supporting cast was already in place, like Kazuhisa Kawahara playing an ornery Lestrade, Seiji Rokkaku as the CSI guy, and veteran character actor Ittoku Kishibe in the Mycroft Holmes role.

Also on dLibrary Japan, Ittoku Kishibe is great as the managing partner of a big law firm in 99.9, a police procedural about a team of eccentric criminal defense lawyers.

dLibrary Japan has a good deal of high quality content. Its biggest weakness in the North American market is that most of the television series aren't subtitled (most of the movies are), though I've noticed that more and more now have machine-translated subtitles (which are useful though of questionable quality).

dLibrary Japan licenses shows for a year or so, and thus has no backlist to speak of, but acquires new titles at a steady clip.

dLibrary Japan's only real competition in live-action scripted television is Rakuten Viki. Unlike dLibrary Japan, subtitling is standard. The programming on Rakuten Viki tends to target a teen to twenty-something audience, while dLibrary Japan appears aimed at an ex-pat forty-plus demographic.

Pretty much the same difference between the domestic audiences for NHK and its commercial competitors in general. Unlike public broadcasters like PBS and the BBC, NHK strives to be about as artistically cutting edge as a butter knife (though it prides itself in its technological prowess).

Related posts

Tubi (update 1)
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Labels: anime, crunchyroll, directv, dish, dlibjapan, japanese, japanese tv, nhk cosmomedia, nhk world, streaming, tubi, tv japan, viki

When I first started streaming with Netflix, I hoped it would continue to build its library of live-action Japanese content. Alas, Netflix is the latest service to discover that there simply isn't a big audience for localized Jdrama in North America.

Or, for that matter, anywhere else, which is why anime makes up 80 percent of Japan's broadcast television overseas exports.

So while Netflix has been busily licensing anime movies and series, and producing anime content for its Netflix Originals catalog, it hasn't added any new live-action scripted Japanese programming. That means dLibrary Japan has the VOD market mostly to itself.

Over the past year, dLibrary Japan has taken that responsibility seriously, evolving from a usable but clunky beta site into a fully functioning streaming provider.

At the end of May, dLibrary Japan revamped the website, making much needed modifications to the Continue Watching list and significantly improving content discovery. The only critical thing left on the to-do list is to move the new features over to the app.

A few bugs remain. The "remember me" login checkbox doesn't remember me for very long. And to get picky, "details" is spelled wrong on the website.

There is still no way to search the website but they've added scads of genre categories and subcategories, making it easy to narrow down selections. You can always search the catalog using the app.

One of the new categories is subtitled content. Though it has less than two dozen titles, five of them are NHK Taiga dramas. At fifty or so episodes each, these historical epics alone might be worth a subscription if you haven't seen them before.

dLibrary Japan is mostly Japanese-only (you can navigate the site in English or Japanese), and is acquiring that Japanese-only content at a brisk clip, adding several new series or seasons a week. I'm looking forward to seeing how the site will grow in the future.

dLibrary Japan is supported on most browsers. There are apps for Android smartphones and tablets, Apple iPhone and iPad, Apple TV, and Roku.

Related posts

dLibrary Japan
Netflix in Japanese
TV Japan and NHK World

Labels: dlibjapan, japanese tv, jdrama, nhk world, streaming, technology, tv japan

As promised back in September 2019, dLibrary Japan is building its catalog at an impressive rate, adding several new titles a week. The lack of content is no longer an issue. Whether you stick with it will depend on what you make of their curated selection so far and on your willingness to watch mostly non-localized content.

Two big reasons to sign up for dLibrary Japan are NHK's two flagship series, the weekly Taiga historical drama and the daily Asadora serial. It'd be nice if they showed up on a predictably timetable after their domestic runs, but the licensing windows are all over the map. Check the "End Date" before getting too invested.

dLibrary Japan has a good selection of six recent Taiga series, including three of the most interesting woman-centered stories you'll find anywhere. And they are subtitled!

Go follows the three nieces of the warlord Oda Nobunaga as they play a major role in shaping the end of the Warring States period, two of them marrying into clans on opposite sides of the conflict.

Atsuhime examines the life of Tenshoin, the adopted daughter of the province lord of Satsuma. Hoping to become the power behind the throne, he arranged a marriage between her and Tokugawa Iesada, the third-to-last shogun.

Yae's Sakura is about a markswoman who fought on the side of the shogunate during the Boshin War that launched the Meiji Restoration. Her firearm of choice was a Spencer repeating rifle.

And then for a view of the events depicted in Atsuhime and Yae's Sakura from the perspective of Japan's Alexander Hamilton, Ryomaden follows the life of Sakamoto Ryoma, who, like Hamilton, tragically died a violent death before his time.

Asadora serials include Ume-chan Sensei, about a girl who attends medical school and becomes a doctor during the Occupation. Toto Nee-chan is a biopic about Shizuko Ohashi (1920–2013), who in 1948 co-founded Notebook for Living, a home improvement magazine still in print.

Though Oshin was the most-watched television program in Japanese history, its Gothic Perils of Pauline plot leaves me disinclined to slog through it. During the 1980s (it debuted in 1983), Oshin became a synonym for perseverance in the face of neverending hostility and opposition.

The cheerfully upbeat Toto Nee-chan is more my speed, and it's been nice to revive my old TV Japan habit of watching a fifteen-minute Asadora episode every night.

Along with the Taiga and Asadora dramas, the scripted content includes family and food dramas, and an eclectic collection of police procedurals and medical dramas, such as the preternaturally cute Aoi Miyazaki playing a teenage super-sleuth in Mobile Detective and Ryoko Yonekura channeling Gregory House in Doctor X.

Mobile Detective is worth watching simply as a reminder of what "cutting edge" smart phone technology was like a mere fifteen years ago.

dLibrary Japan has the first three seasons of Midnight Diner, an ensemble series that takes place at an all-night hole-in-the wall restaurant (Netflix has seasons 4 and 5). And speaking of food dramas, dLibrary Japan has six seasons of Solitary Gourmet, pretty much the salaryman version of Wakakozake.

On a quirkier note is Room Laundering (think "money laundering"), which arises out of Japanese superstitions about renting an apartment in which the previous occupant died. Miko's job is to move in, figure out why the ghost haunting the place is hanging around, and get it to move on. The real estate version of Ghost Whisperer.

For whatever reason it was shot in a 21:9 aspect ratio. I really don't see the point of that (I don't see the point of shooting anything in 21:9 except as a special effect).

There are a handful of documentaries and talk shows, such as Matsuko no Shiranai Sekai ("The World Unknown To Matsuko"), and the Wildlife and Great Nature documentary series from NHK. Plus a cute travel show in which Tetsuro Degawa rides a electric scooter until the battery is dead and then bums a charge from the locals.

In the movie category, dLibrary Japan has the entire Tsuribaka Nisshi ("Diary of a Fishing Nut") franchise. Starring the delightful character actor Toshiyuki Nishida, this film series follows the adventures of a salaryman at a construction company who will concoct any excuse to go fishing. And still manages to save the day.

The handful of anime titles on dLibrary Japan are aimed at kids, such as Anpanman, a long-running kid's franchise (1500 episodes and counting) hugely popular in Japan and practically nowhere else. (Tim Lyu explains why.)

So far, there's more than enough to keep me interested. If dLibrary Japan keeps adding new programming at the current rate, it will become the unquestioned home of live-action Japanese television in North America. Though I'm afraid it won't be able to significantly expand beyond the TV Japan and Nippon TV audiences without more localization.

Related links

dLibrary Japan (background)
dLibrary Japan (user experience)
dLibrary Japan
dLibrary Japan Roku app
NHK World
TV Japan

Labels: asadora, dlibjapan, history, japanese tv, nhk, nhk world, streaming, taiga drama, tv japan